AUSTRALIA:


Secret life of Hitler's secretary

ADOLF Hitler's devoted secretary, who spent the final days of the Third
Reich huddled with the Fuhrer in his Berlin bunker, quietly lived in
Australia for several years in the 1970s and 80s after she was earlier
refused permanent residency for being a Nazi sympathiser.

Traudl Junge - the central character of the recent controversial movie
Downfall, which attempts to humanise Hitler - tried to beat the onset of
depression years after World War II by starting a new life in Australia,
family members and friends in Sydney and Melbourne have revealed for the
first time.

She lived in Sydney with her younger sister over two years in about
1975-76, spent a further 18 months there in the early 80s and visited
Melbourne in 1992 and 1995, The Weekend Australian has been told.

Friends said that as recently as 10 years ago, she was considering
reapplying for permanent Australian residency. "She loved Australia and
the people," her sister, Inge Kaye, 81, said from her Sydney nursing home.

Photographs from the Kaye family album show Junge, the daughter of a Nazi
party official, relaxing on the beach in Noosa Heads, enjoying the
sunshine in Cairns and catching up with friends in Melbourne.

Junge's sympathetic reflections on Hitler - she continued to describe him
as "a kindly, thoughtful man" even after the full horrors of his reign
emerged - formed the basis of Downfall, which began screening in Australia
in April.

It has become Germany's highest-grossing film, but provoked anger from
some viewers who claimed that it glorified the mass-murdering architect of
the Holocaust.

Junge was a 22-year-old bearing a resemblance to Hitler's mistress, Eva
Braun, when he chose her in 1942 to work as one of his secretaries.

It was an exciting moment for Junge, who confided years later that as a
teenager growing up in Munich she had daydreamed about saving the Fuhrer's
life.

Only six months after starting work for Hitler, she married his valet and
orderly, SS officer Hans Junge - at her boss's insistence, she later
claimed to Melbourne friend Margaret Williams.

He was killed in action in Normandy in 1944.

Junge, who struck up a close relationship with Braun during their years
together, was among the last people to see Hitler alive before he and
Braun swallowed cyanide tablets in a Berlin bunker two days after hastily
marrying.

Hitler also shot himself in the head.

After the war, Junge was exonerated as a "youthful fellow traveller" by
Germany's denazification commission, but said she couldn't escape a
"growing sense of guilt" about her association with Hitler and his
cronies.

Before her death in 2002, Junge told a German interviewer that she began
to dream of a new life in Australia between 1967 and 1971 after "long
periods of depression, hospitalisation, unsuccessful psychotherapy, lack
of enthusiasm for her career".

But she said "Australian authorities" rejected her application for
permanent residency because of her role in the Third Reich.

She said she travelled to Australia as a tourist, staying "several
months". But interviews with friends and family show her Australian links
ran far deeper.

Even in the mid-1990s, after at least four visits, she was still
considering whether to reapply for permanent residency, said Mrs Williams,
whose parents lived next door to Junge's sister Inge and her husband
Stefan Kaye in the early 1950s when they migrated to Melbourne.

Mr Kaye, 82, confirmed that Junge applied for permanent residency, but was
denied.

Soon after, he said he helped secure her passage to Australia by
contacting one of Sydney's most powerful Jewish businessmen, property
tycoon Paul Strasser.

Mr Kaye, a former Polish soldier and member of the underground resistance,
was working as a manager at Sydney's Menzies Hotel, then owned by one of
Sir Paul's companies.

He said he told Sir Paul that Junge was "just a normal person" and asked
him if he could gauge whether high-level members of Sydney's Jewish
community would object to her presence in Australia.

"She was just a normal person, but there was a certain resentment then,"
he said, from his home on Sydney's north shore.

He said Sir Paul, who died in 1989, approached influential Jewish business
leader Charles Berg, who said "we won't oppose her coming". Sir Paul and
Berg, a former Australian Opera chairman who died in 1988, had both
experienced Nazi brutality first-hand: Sir Paul spent 2 1/2 years in a
Nazi labour camp from 1942 to 1945, while Berg grew up a Jew in Nazi
Berlin.

Both had strong links to the federal Government, but Mr Kaye did not know
whether they approached government officials to discuss Junge's case.

The Kayes say they cannot recall whether Junge entered Australia on a
tourist visa or was granted a short-term stay visa on a family reunion
basis.

Searches at the Australian National Archives found no documents related to
her application for residency or her subsequent visits. Documents were
found that show Junge's mother Hildegard Humps, who strongly disapproved
of her daughter's work with the Nazis, also emigrated to Australia,
arriving in June 1954 aboard the Fairsea. But she stayed for only two
years before returning to Munich, where she died in 1969.

Mr Kaye, who changed his surname from Krukovski upon his arrival in
Australia, said Junge stayed for about two years on her first visit,
during which they made a road trip to Cairns and visited Melbourne.

"She took up pottery, and made friends easily," he said.

He said in the early 1980s, about six years after leaving Australia, she
returned and stayed for about another 18 months.

Jim and Elvie Franke, who lived next door to the Kayes at their first home
in Melbourne's North Kew, recall meeting Junge in November 1975. "She
loved theatre. She was an artistic person," Elvie Franke said.

The Frankes' son, Ron Franke, remembers Junge's frustration at her
difficulties in emigrating to Australia. "She was a lovely lady, but in
those days she had a bit of trouble with ASIO," he said.

Mr Kaye said he wasn't sure if ASIO agents tailed Junge during her
Australian travels. The Frankes said they did not press her on her past,
and accepted her insistence that she knew nothing of the "Final Solution".

"I know she was upset about it," Mr Franke said. "It is hard to believe
that she didn't know, but she said she didn't know."

According to Mrs Williams, the Frankes' daughter, Junge visited Australia
again in the summer of 1992 and in 1995 for Mrs Williams's wedding.

(source: The Australian)